Marque homes languish on state housing market

Tuesday

Sep 7, 2010 at 2:22 PMSep 7, 2010 at 2:23 PM

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Southern California's homes-sale listings are beginning to resemble an index to the country's most famous mid-20thcentury architects as marque properties languish on the market as the wellheeled become increasingly reluctant to buy.

Homes by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler that once sold briskly to architectural aficionados for stratospheric prices are now selling at a loss — if at all.

"Those days of easy money and money-is-no-object artwork kinds of prices are gone," said architect and real estate agent Brian Linder, who has a listing for a 1937 condo unit by Austrian emigre designer Richard Neutra that's had its price cut to $675,000 after hitting the market in May for $815,000.

It's a big change from just a few years ago, when the housing-finance bubble that inflated property values throughout the country earlier in the decade showed itself even more prominently among architecturally significant homes. Those homes often sold for many times what their less notable neighbors fetched.

Pierre Koenig's late 1960s Case Study House No. 21, for example, sold in December 2006 after barely a week on the market for $3.2 million, or around $2,400 a square foot. That compares to an average of $500 to $600 per square foot for neighboring homes at the time, Linder said.

But the prices of many of these pedigreed homes hasn't yet come down to the level where buyers would be willing to make a purchase.

A 1949 home built in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains outside Los Angeles by John Lautner, best known for the octagonal Chemosphere that looms over the Hollywood Hills, has been on the market for about two years.

The asking price for the airy red wood-and-glass structure, called the Schaffer Residence, debuted at around $2 million, but has since been cut to about $1.5 million.

In the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood, the Austrianborn Schindler's sparse, concrete How House hit the market in September 2008 at around $5 million. Its last listing was at $1.9 million.

Meanwhile, in the hills overlooking the neighborhood of Los Feliz, Wright's Ennis house, which has been featured in such movies as "Blade Runner" and "House on Haunted Hill," has had its price reduced from $15 million last summer to about $7.5 million and it still hasn't found a buyer.

The 1924 home's current owner, the nonprofit Ennis House Foundation, began seeking a buyer for the home in the Mayan-ruins-inspired "textile-block" style after spending some $6.5 million to fix damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Another of Wright's Mayan-influenced homes, the Millard House in Pasadena, has had its price cut from nearly $8 million to around $5 million during the two years it's been for sale.